על הגירת אברהם ל״הOn the Migration of Abraham 35
א׳
1[192] If in this way you learn to effect a divorce from what is mortal, you will go on to receive an education in your conceptions regarding the Uncreate. For you surely do not imagine that, while your mind, having divested itself of body, sense-perception, speech, can, apart from these, see in their nakedness the things that are, the Mind of the universe, God, has not His abiding-place outside all material nature, containing, not contained, or doubt that He has gone forth beyond its confines not in thought alone, as man does, but in essential being also, as befits God.
ב׳
2[193] For our mind has not created the body, but is the workmanship of Another; and it is therefore contained in the body as in a vessel. But the Mind of all things has brought the universe into existence; and that which has made is superior to the thing made, so that it could not be included in its inferior; nor indeed would it be fitting that a father should be contained in a son, but rather that a son should attain full growth under his father’s care.
ג׳
3[194] In this way the mind gradually changing its place will arrive at the Father of piety and holiness. Its first step is to relinquish astrology, which betrayed it into the belief that the universe is the primal God, instead of being the handywork of the primal God, and that the courses and movements of the constellations are the causes of bad and good fortune to mankind.
ד׳
4[195] Next it enters upon the consideration of itself, makes a study of the features of its own abode, those that concern the body and sense-perception, and speech, and comes to know, as the phrase of the poet puts it,
ה׳
5All that existeth of good and of ill in the halls of thy homestead.
ו׳
6The third stage is when, having opened up the road that leads from self, in hope thereby to come to discern the Universal Father, so hard to trace and unriddle, it will crown maybe the accurate self-knowledge it has gained with the knowledge of God Himself. It will stay no longer in Haran, the organs of sense, but withdraw into itself. For it is impossible that the mind whose course still lies in the sensible rather than the mental should arrive at the contemplation of Him that IS.